


Heirs of a Cold War

by micehell



Series: Heirs of a Coldwar [1]
Category: Johnny's Entertainment, TOKIO
Genre: AU (mental hospital), Drama, Gen, Some Humor, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-21
Updated: 2012-10-21
Packaged: 2017-11-16 19:02:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,914
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/542798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/micehell/pseuds/micehell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If you're seeing things running through your head... you might be crazy.  Or you might be them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Heirs of a Cold War

**Author's Note:**

> This owes a lot of itself to shows like SPN, XF, & _Alphas_ , as well as things like _DxD_ , _Psychometrer Eiji_ , and the like... just in case that wasn't pretty much apparent by the end of the first section. ;)
> 
> The title's from Ozzy's _Crazy Train_ , and though I'm not using it the same way he did, the lyrics to the song still oddly fit what I wanted, so there you go.

1.

The Nishitama Health Institute sounded like a hospital and looked like prison. It felt like a prison, too, with windows covered by wire mesh, locked doors that only opened inward, and orderlies that looked like former sumo champions not yet gone to seed.

Walking in through those doors, knowing he wouldn’t be going out again, not without a miracle, Tatsuya felt the weight of eyes on him, peering at him through the mesh that covered even the interior windows. A sea of faces pressed close to the glass, too close to the mesh, and Tatsuya was reminded of a Hieronymus Bosch painting.

The doctor who approached Tatsuya and his parents didn’t look like he belonged there; smooth, handsome features, calming manner, soft voice. “Welcome to Nishitama, Mr. and Mrs. Yamaguichi. I’m Dr. Takashima, we spoke on the phone. Why don’t you come into my office for some tea or coffee and we’ll discuss the… situation while we have someone get Tatsuya settled.”

His parents were certainly receptive to it, smiling in relief, their anxiety seeming to fade in the face of all that smooth professionalism. But Tatsuya had learned a long, hard three years ago to trust his nose far more than he did his other senses, and he could smell the harsh chemical scents of the ‘feel good’ pills the man pushed, and the arrogance and disdain that hid beneath the outer image but that even the expensive aftershave he wore couldn’t really mask.

Tatsuya could have tried to tell his parents (could have made just that _one_ more effort to be free), but he was tired of them ignoring him (three years tired of being their dirty little secret), so he just nodded when Dr. Takashima said, “Wait here, Tatsuya. Someone will be by shortly to show you to your room.” He watched his parents walk away, knowing they wouldn’t stay around to say goodbye to him. They were wearing their concerned parents mask, but too happy underneath it at finally being able to lock their problem away before anyone found out about it.

He expected someone to come for him quickly, considering that, regardless of the swank sounding name, this was a hospital for nutcases, and it wouldn’t do to let the nutcases just wander the lobby, locked doors or not. But ten minutes came and went without anyone showing up. It made Tatsuya anxious, to be left standing like that, all those eyes still on him with nowhere to hide and no idea where he was supposed to be or what he was supposed to do. He would have been amused at being anxious to get to a room that was nowhere he wanted to go if he hadn’t already been full up on other emotions (anger, betrayal, fear) at the time.

Before he could work up the courage to ask the receptionist which way it was to his prison cell, an orderly came for him. If the doctor’s outward appearance hadn’t matched the décor, the orderly’s appearance totally did it in. He was fairly tall, like the ex-sumo orderlies that guarded the doors, but he was like a stick next to them, all long legs and no mass. His hair was cut short like the others, but it was spiked, a skull earring adding to the rocker look. The oddest part, though, was the fact that he didn’t look a day over fifteen (and that was being generous), and Tatsuya almost balked at being under the authority of someone who didn’t look old enough to shave.

The orderly didn’t give him time to make up his mind about the balking thing, though, descending on him in a cloud of extravagant hand gestures and nearly constant monolog, though there was a pause every now and then where Tatsuya might have answered if he weren’t so stunned by the barrage.

“My name’s Matsuoka, but you can call me Mabo, almost everyone does. Well, almost everyone that’s not completely off their rocker, anyway. Mr. Kitigawa down at the end of the first hall tends to just call me You, but then he pretty much does that to everyone, so you should be prepared to be called that, too. When he tells you that he can make you a star, just nod and play along. If you try to explain reality to him, he just makes a fuss, and it’s really not pretty, so be a sport, huh?”

That was where the first pause was, apparently left so that Tatsuya could affirm his sportishness and Mabo could pick up Tatsuya’s one small suitcase (who knew what to pack when you were being committed?), but Tatsuya was still trying to digest the odd appearance and the fact that the kid could talk so much without appearing to breathe. Mabo had started talking again, herding him out of the lobby at the same time, before Tatsuya could do anything more than blink.

Once out of the lobby, Mabo shooed off the patients that had been staring and led Tatsuya down each of the hallways of the ward, pointing out things of interest as they passed by. “That’s Mr. Sato’s room. He thinks he’s a newt, one of the semi-aquatic ones, so watch out for the kiddy pool if you go in his room. Sometimes he likes to spit and pretend that it’s a skin secretion, like those newts that have the same poison like puffer fish do, so watch his cheeks to make sure he’s not building up a mouthful. Oh, and Mrs. Kurosawa thinks she’s Sei Shonagon, so don’t let her corner you. Wandering hands doesn’t even begin to cover it and she’s pretty feisty for a seventy-year-old.”

He didn’t seem to be in any hurry to get Tatsuya to his room, going so far as to show him the laundry room even though the door was kept locked and patients weren’t ever allowed in there. They eventually wound up in the rec room, where the patients that had been staring had all retreated to. They were ignoring Tatsuya now, instead intently focused on the pudding cups that were being passed out by another of the mammoth orderlies, eager and impatient until they got their cups and then blissful as they ate them. 

Mabo told him, with the tone of a man imparting a great secret, “They’re just the same kind of pudding cups you can get at any conbini, but yesterday I told everyone that there was a magic elixir in them that would make the doctors leave them alone, so now there’s a flourishing black market trade. Guard yours with your life if you don’t want to lose it. Though, really, since they basically taste like sugared paste, you could just sell yours off for some extra game room time and come out ahead.”

Tatsuya had guessed back around Mr. Sato’s room that Mabo wasn’t really an orderly, which had only added to his confusion. He’d wasted a couple of minutes trying to figure out how an inmate had managed to get into the lobby in the first place, why he was wearing a uniform instead of the pajamas and robes most of the other patients seemed to favor (though there were normal clothes mixed in here and there), and how come none of the orderlies had stopped him anywhere along the way as well, but Tatsuya had seen Mabo take care to greet everyone, patients (even the ones that just sat and stared vacantly) and staff alike, and he’d seen how they’d all smiled back, smelling warm and pleased for a moment under the haze of medicine and madness that suffused the whole ward. Eventually Tatsuya had just accepted it, figuring that Mabo, young as he was, was the head crazy; sweet and at least sort of sane, trusted by everyone. 

The pudding was the first sign he’d seen of the boy that Mabo should have been (if he’d never been committed, if he’d only been less sort of and more sane). Pulling pranks and making deals for extra game time and laughing while he told Tatsuya all about it. Tatsuya found himself joining in, the first time he’d laughed since he’d came here (the first time he’d laughed in forever), and all the anxiety that not even Mabo’s chatter had been able to distract him from finally started to wane. Whatever else was happening here, it wasn’t as bad as he’d feared, not if people could still laugh. In a non-psychotic kind of way, at any rate.

Tatsuya was still laughing when Mabo stopped, that baby face going sad and serious in a way it hadn’t been once since they’d met. He was looking over at a corner, where another boy sat alone, ignoring the fuss about the pudding cups as well as everything else in the room. Or at least everything else that Tatsuya could see, since the kid was arguing with air, and obviously upset about whatever the air was saying. “Who’s that?”

Mabo sighed, head dropping to consider the suitcase he still held, studying it as if it held the answer to a troubling question. “That’s Nagase. He sees ghosts.”

It was the shortest thing he’d said about anyone along the way, and it didn’t explain why it made Mabo sad. Tatsuya looked at Nagase, trying to figure out what it was, but all he saw was a kid around twelve or so, skinny as a reed, but looking tall for his age, though it was hard to tell for sure with the way he huddled in on himself. Besides the fact that he was so young (and it wasn’t like Mabo was exactly old himself), Tatsuya couldn’t see what the problem was. “Why does it bother you that he thinks he sees ghosts when you were willing to accept Mr. Sato thinking he was a newt without worrying about it, even with the spitting?”

Mabo’s head came up, smiling again. It wasn’t the sweet smile of before, though, this one cynical and jaded and far too used to how unfair the world could be. Tatsuya had seen that smile before, looking back from his mirror almost every day since his sixteenth birthday. “I didn’t say he _thinks_ he sees ghosts, I said he _sees_ them.”

It scared Tatsuya, what Mabo was saying. Not because he was scared of ghosts, or even of Mabo being crazy enough to do so. Tatsuya had met any number of people in his life who believed in them, who even believed they’d seen one, or at least had a friend of a friend who had. But he’d never met anyone who had any real story, any concrete thing they could point to that wasn’t just an odd draft of air blowing a curtain or double-exposure on film made into something more by belief and superstition. No, it wasn’t the ghosts or the craziness that scared Tatsuya. It was the idea that Mabo, who had that same smile on his face that Tatsuya had worn too often, might be telling the truth.

The sound of a slap came from the corner, Nagase’s head going to the side and down as if he’d been hit, and Mabo ran over to stand between him and the air (it _had_ to be air, Tatsuya thought). Mabo was facing away from Nagase, trying to look as threatening as too young and skinny could to whatever might be there (nothing, _nothing_ , Tatsuya hoped) when he asked, “Are you okay?” With what had happened, it was probably Nagase he was asking (should have been Nagase he was asking), but it was Tatsuya he was looking at when he said it.

Nagase was old enough that his voice was just starting to change, his, “Yeah,” breaking a little even as quiet and monotone as it was. 

Tatsuya’s voice had changed nearly seven years before, but his voice broke a little, too, when he answered, “No. That… that can’t be real. He just hit himself and we didn’t see it.”

The kid looked up at that, long hair falling back away from his face, a hand print in red stark against the pale skin of his cheek, but he didn’t say anything, looking resigned, as if he was too tired to argue anymore. Tatsuya knew that look, too. He’d worn it just that morning when his parents had told him to pack.

Mabo was willing to argue, though. “It’s as real as the fact that I can tell things about people by touching objects they’ve held. Like, say, this suitcase handle. It’s been telling me a lot about you.”

Psychometry, another myth, and nothing that Tatsuya believed in. Any more than he’d believed in vampires or werewolves or anything like that…

“It tells me you got bitten by a dog on your sixteenth birthday and that you’ve been not _quite_ right ever since.”

… before he’d gotten bit by a dog on his sixteenth birthday and been not _quite_ right ever since.

~*~ 

Considering that pretty much nothing else had gone the way he’d expected, Tatsuya was almost glad his room was as bleak and prison-like as he’d imagined. One lumpy cot with a too thin blanket and over-starched sheets. One hard chair, bolted down. One small bureau with drawers that would only go out so far (apparently to keep anyone from dying an ignominious death by small bedroom furniture). One tiny bathroom that had a door that wouldn’t lock, a toilet that had a built in seat and no cover (“Be careful of your aim,” Nagase said), and a teensy little sink that not even a mouse would be able to drown himself in.

Impersonal, cold, horrible… and yet not quite as horrible as it could be because of the two people sitting in the room with him.

“I don’t get it,” Mabo said, making himself completely at home on Tatsuya’s cot. “Why would it be better to think you really are crazy than that you’re some kind of, er, were-creature or whatever?”

Nagase was sitting at the bottom of the cot in the small space Mabo had left him, knees drawn up with his chin resting on them, his hair hanging over his eyes (which Tatsuya guessed he hid behind a lot). He titled his head at Mabo’s question, though, one eye showing above the cheek that wasn’t bruised, definitely curious as well.

Tatsuya sat on the floor (the chair not having been designed for human anatomy apparently) and wondered how to say it. It was hard to define the jumble of fear and anger that had been shifting around inside him for the last three years, and he was almost relieved when Mabo, constitutionally unable to quietly wait for a reply, kept talking.

“Were-creature sounds all weird, but I couldn’t really see what it was, since it was from your point of view, of course, and basically all I got from that was a brief glimpse of what was probably fur. But then I never heard of anyone becoming a werewolf from a dog bite, so I thought maybe not that… but then I’ve never heard of anyone outside of a horror movie or whatever actually becoming a werewolf, so it’s not like there’s a reference guide I could look it up on. Is there?”

It was just rambling because Mabo didn’t like silence. Because he was young and dealing with things that even adults would falter at, and, really, it wasn’t like there _was_ a reference guide for any of it. He was rambling because Tatsuya, the oldest one there, wasn’t doing even half as well as someone he thought of as a kid. Two kids, the both of them, sitting on his bed and looking at him with eyes that knew what he was and weren’t in the least bit embarrassed by it. So, okay, that was partly because they were obviously in the freak show themselves, but it was also because they’d both accepted what they were and couldn’t understand why Tatsuya wouldn’t. And for the first time since his life had been turned inside out, Tatsuya found himself with a reason to not _want_ to believe his parents’ claim (even when he could smell the lie on them) that it was all in his head. To not want to live in denial with them like he’d tried so hard to do because… well, because it had been better than living with the truth alone.

Tatsuya could have told the two of them that, might very well explain it one day, when the desire to hide wasn’t still so strong, but he was tired from all the emotional upheaval and self-discovery (not to mention from Mabo’s grand tour), so he just shrugged and asked, “What do you guys do around here for fun?”

And maybe it just made Tatsuya more of a freak than ever, but the fact that Mabo’s eyes got an even more manic glint in them and that Nagase smiled at him for the first time since they’d met, made the impersonal, cold, horrible room seem more like home than the one he’d been forced to leave just that morning.

~*~

2.

He’d been right that first day when he’d thought the hospital wasn’t as bad as he’d feared, but he’d been dead wrong, too. It mainly just depended on the day.

Tuesdays and Thursdays were good. On those days the hospital was more a playground for Mabo’s mad schemes, though they rarely got in trouble for them. The orderlies and nurses were _mostly_ nice, and while Tatsuya was treated with the kind of distant care you’d expect them to give a patient and while Nagase tended to be treated as a bomb that might go off at any moment, there were only two orderlies and absolutely no nurses that didn’t adore Mabo, so even the more outrageous schemes (the Laundry Room Caper would go down in history) usually just got their game room hours docked (and Mabo usually made those back on yet another scheme).

It was a Tuesday that Mabo finally badgered Tatsuya into admitting what kind of were- _creature_ he was.

“Come on, Gussan, you know all about our curses. Why won’t you tell us yours?”

Tatsuya laughed at that. “Gussan?”

Mabo waved it off. “Tatsuya is just too normal, so you definitely need a nickname.”

He looked at Nagase, who shrugged. “He tried to call me Tomo-chan for the first month I was here. He only stopped when I threatened to throw my vote to the tear-jerker romance faction when everyone was deciding what to watch for movie night. He called me Nagase after that and we watched _Godzilla: Final Wars_ that Sunday.”

Tatsuya thought about it, but he’d never be able to follow through with the threat if he made it (in no way willing to risk crying over a soppy romance in front of Mrs. Kurosawa, who would probably try to ‘comfort’ him if he did… or Mr. Sato, either, since he might think the tears were some kind of poisonous secretion). So he just shrugged as well and asked, “Why don’t you use your pschometry to figure it out?” 

Mabo huffed. “I don’t use it to spy on you guys! Not mostly, anyway. I mean sometimes I can’t help but get a flash or something, which is why I wear the gloves sometimes, but I’d never _try_ to do it.”

And the fact that he really wouldn’t try to spy on people (with or without his curse as he called it), not those he thought of as friends anyway, was just one of the reasons that Mabo had so many friends in the first place.

“Not to mention that even when I maybe intentionally slip juuuussst a little, it’s psychometry, not magic, and it’s not like I can pick what I’ll see.”

And that was the reason he was such a brat, but it still made Tatsuya laugh. And it wasn’t like they’d not figure it out eventually. One day something would happen that would surprise Tatsuya, or make him angry enough to lose control, and then the beast inside him would come out. Such as it were.

Needing privacy (though why, he wondered, since all the staff thought he was crazy anyway), he took them back to Mabo’s room, which had way more personal stuff in it than Tatsuya’s or Nagase’s, not to mention a chair that wouldn’t break anyone who dared to sit in it (Saki, a nurse on the night shift, had just winked at him when Mabo had traded out the old torture chamber one for one of the chairs from the staff room).

He kept wondering how to explain things. He debated whether to talk about the mechanics of it (no painful morphing or anything, though the getting tangled in his clothes thing when he changed (not to mention the nudity when he changed back) was a hassle). Or maybe how wrong the movies had been (the only thing the full moon did to him was sometimes make him more romantic than he wanted to admit to being). But while he was debating it all, Nagase and Mabo kept arguing about what creature he became, getting more and more ridiculous as they went (“There’s no such thing as a were-unicorn!” “Oh, like were-elephant was so much better!”), until Tatsuya finally just let the damn thing take over and shifted right in front of them.

It stopped the argument dead in its tracks.

Mabo got up from the comfy chair he’d called dibs on it (since he’d stolen it fair and square) and walked around Tatsuya, pursing his lips in consideration. “Hmm, not what I expected, but I guess it makes sense, all things considered.”

Nagase, however, wasn’t anywhere near as restrained, picking Tatsuya up and hugging him close, his voice breaking (once again) as he cooed, “How cute!”

Tatsuya, looking every inch like a prize-winning American Cocker Spaniel, sighed, the fluffy hair around his muzzle flapping as he did.

~*~

Sundays were okay, too, mostly filled with assigned chores (for the inmates functional enough to do them) and extended outdoor hours in the fenced-in yard at the back of the hospital. Mabo usually spent the free time making his rounds of the staff, schmoozing as he insisted on calling it, but Nagase usually tagged along after Tatsuya as he walked around the far too short laps that circling the yard made.

Sometimes he talked Tatsuya’s ear off (about soccer teams he liked, about a video game he’d been playing recently, about Mr. Kitigawa’s latest attempt to scout him, never about his past), but a lot of the times he was quiet, keeping pace beside Tatsuya until something (or more like someone, though Tatsuya, of course, could never see them) distracted him.

“Did you talk much before you came here, or have you always been kind of quiet?” Tatsuya could understand that the kid didn’t want to talk about the past, being committed so young not speaking of happy times, but he wanted to know all the same, even guessing it might be painful.

But while Nagase wasn’t exactly the most apt of students, he was intuitive about people in a way that made up for it. Ask him about the pyramids (“They’re in India, aren’t they?”) or about kanji, and he was lost. Ask him about people, and he understood a lot more than he’d actually let on. It unfortunately meant that he could often see right through the living as well as the dead, so he just shrugged at Tatsuya’s question. “It’s hard to get a word in edgewise sometimes.”

Tatsuya laughed. “Mabo does make it hard to find an opening, even to answer him when he asks a question.”

Nagase wasn’t looking at him anymore, focused on something Tatsuya couldn’t see. “Him, too, but really, it’s always noisy in my world.”

And as much as Tatsuya had come to accept that they all weren’t crazy after all, he still shivered a little, even in the heat of the afternoon sun.

~*~

Saturdays were bad for all of them, no matter how much they all tried to brush it off. For Tatsuya, it was hard to pretend it didn’t hurt when Mr. Kitigawa’s sister visited him every Saturday without fail, and even Mrs. Kurosawa’s grandchildren took turns to see her so there was always someone there, and yet every Saturday went by without his parents showing once. 

He’d expected it, really. But even though he told himself every Saturday to just grow up already and to just the fuck deal with it, he never quite could. 

When he started feeling sorry for himself, Tatsuya liked to remember that he wasn’t the worst one off. Yeah, his parents had always been distant, but at least he’d had an okay childhood. It hadn’t been until he was sixteen that he’d had to wonder if they’d ever loved him at all, or if it had just been them trying to be the perfect family they’d thought they should be (that they wanted to _appear_ to be).

Even Nagase, his mother dead and his father never around (Mabo had gotten that from sneaking a look at his file, since Nagase never talked about it), wasn’t the worst one off. The one personal thing he had in his room was a much-loved sock monkey that his mother had made for him before she’d died. Mabo had told Tatsuya he’d only ever touched it once, because the image of Nagase’s mother, smiling and happy, had been so strong he’d seen it even when he’d tried not to. 

It was actually Mabo that had it worst, though he hid it as well as he could. Tatsuya could smell it on him, though, and Nagase just seemed to know in that way he had. And so on the Saturdays no one showed up to see Mabo, they let him have their pudding cups, and on the Saturdays his father actually bothered to come (usually drunk and angry, though Tatsuya guessed that was his default state), they gave him their pudding cups and pretended to not notice that he’d been crying.

~*~

But for all that, it was Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays that were the worst. Those were the days that therapy sessions and treatments (that were a joke) got in the way of their being able to get to Nagase’s room before the nurses showed up to dope him up for the day. Without Mabo or Tatsuya being there to distract them, the nurses always made sure that Nagase had swallowed all his meds, even going as far as calling in the orderlies when he tried to balk, and it was those days that Nagase had no defenses against the ghosts. 

On the other days of the week, when the only pills he’d didn’t just fake swallowing were the multi-vitamins Mabo insisted he take, Nagase could mostly deal with the ghosts. He’d talk to the ones that just wanted company, smiling at what looked like air while all the staff and even some of the inmates just shook their head at him. For the ghosts that were looking to move on, he’d take them back to his room, where he’d screw up his face in concentration (biting his tongue as he focused, just like he did when he was trying to do the homework Dr. Takashima assigned him), and then there’d be this bright stream of light, like the air had torn and the sun was peeking out of it, and the sharp smell of ozone (at least to Tatsuya’s nose, though Mabo said he couldn’t smell it), and then after a couple of seconds it would all disappear and Nagase would want a nap and everything was fine. 

On those good days, when one of the ghosts who’d grown mean (or who’d been that way from the start) showed up, Nagase could at the least mostly avoid them, and sometimes (on the best of good days, when things went just right) he could actually exorcise them.

On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, though, Nagase couldn’t shut out the voices, the pleas for help, the tricks and violence of the ones that just liked to hurt. On those days, the were-dog that Tatsuya was (the one that he’d always been embarrassed about, even when he was in the worst of his denial about the whole thing) came in handy. Dog senses (even were-dog senses apparently) worked better than humans in a lot of ways, and he could half-way sense where the ghosts were. He’d growl and raise the fur on his back at them, and even though he looked adorably cute while doing it if Nagase were to be believed, it was apparently enough to chase off at least some of the ghosts. 

On those days, when they could, they’d sleep all in one bunk, two skinny boys and one (almost) medium sized dog hardly taking up any room. And when they couldn’t… well, Mabo would pet Nagase the next day, making sure to be careful of the bruises, and Tatsuya would let Nagase pet him, and they’d get through even the bad days as best they could. 

Tatsuya knew it wasn’t quite good enough, that eventually something would have to break, and that it would likely be Nagase, but it was all they could do. It wasn’t like anyone else was going to do anything for them.

~*~

3.

It was a Wednesday when the two new guys showed up: one new orderly and one new crazy. If it hadn't been for the uniform, Tatsuya would have had a hard time telling the difference.

"I'm really not here because I'm actually crazy," the crazy one said to Mabo, who'd, of course, taken it upon himself to meet and greet them (and, also of course, had insisted Tatsuya come with him).

"He's totally crazy," the orderly said, followed immediately by, "Umph!" as the crazy one elbowed him. As if he had planned to keep going on all along, the orderly finished with, "But that's not the reason he's here, of course."

Tatsuya was more than half afraid to find out what the crazy one thought he was actually there for (he was just hoping it didn't involve any spitting), but Mabo managed to deflect any further conversation with a much more mundane round of introductions. 

The tour went pretty much like Tatsuya remembered from his first time all those months ago except for several notable exceptions: 1) the new crazy got cornered by Mr. Kitigawa before Mabo had had a chance to explain about the _I'll make you a star_ thing, and was quite disappointed to find out it wasn't true, and 2) Nagase wasn't the big draw this time, though that had more to do with the fact that he was playing _Winning 11_ in a drugged haze and not even ghosts could distract him from that. 

As weird as the new patient was, Tatsuya liked Joshima. He was a little shy and seemed far too intent on proclaiming his non-craziness (he tried to bring it up five separate times during Mabo's (once again excessive) tour), but he was sweet and he seemed self-aware enough for all his weirdness, plus he seemed like a good sport; neither Mr. Sato's spitting, the new orderly's snark, nor the fact that Mabo had conned him out of his pudding cup within minutes of his entering the rec room seemed to faze the guy in the least.

As weird as the new orderly was, Tatsuya like Taichi as well. He seemed more snarky than an orderly really should be, and his work ethic seemed a little hazy (since he kept following them around instead of doing orderly type things), but he was funny and _almost_ sweet (he only rolled his eyes a little over Joshima losing the pudding cup) and he was just as bad as Nagase about _Winning 11_ (Joshima only rolled his eyes a little when Taichi missed Tatsuya offering him a pudding cup of his own (and missed Mabo giving it to Joshima instead) because he was too busy arguing with Nagase over who had the better team).

~*~

After Nagase's first non-drugged look at the two new guys, Tatsuya did wonder a little at his own reaction to them. Nagase talked to Taichi pretty much the same way he had when he was stoned (polite but with just a tinge of _I totally won, you loser!_ thrown in for color), but he went totally quiet around Joshima, subconsciously (or maybe not) keeping Tatsuya between them and only looking at the new guy out of the corner of his eye.

Tatsuya started to ask him about it, but got distracted by Joshima launching into his habitual _I'm not here because I'm crazy_ routine. Later, after lights out, Tatsuya remembered that he'd wanted to ask, but he was sleepy (and already at the point where he was lazy with it, eyes dragging down as he considered the hassle of slipping past the orderlies in his human form… and so not wanting to talk to Nagase while he was naked, which he'd be if he had to shift to get by them). Besides, Tatsuya reasoned (with sleep-fueled logic), Nagase was almost thirteen and starting to be affected as much by hormones as he was by ghosts, so who knew what his reasons were for anything he did. And anyway, he could always ask later. It wasn't like any of them were going anywhere, after all.

~*~

Since the next morning was early therapy, Tatsuya didn't get to see Nagase until he was already doped to the gills. A little ditzy at the best of times, Nagase became a total space cadet on the drugs (sometimes answering the questions you asked him and sometimes answering something that might have been in another language altogether), and Tatsuya was half-way regretting not asking about Joshima when he'd thought of it, when the only answer he could get asking now was Nagase staring intently at Tatsuya's hands and wondering, "Are you sure he's not a ghost?"

Considering where the kid was looking, that was even more confusing than it seemed. He waved one of the hands, trying to get Nagase to focus on his face, even if just by accident. "Who, Joshima or me?"

Nagase frowned at him, apparently not sure himself, but then the mists seemed to clear a little. "He keeps disappearing while I look at him. So I thought he might be a ghost. But then everyone kept talking to him. So I thought he might not be. But then he disappeared again. So."

Nagase had lost interest in Tatsuya's hands, but his own were suddenly taking all of his attention, so Tatsuya left him to it and went to find Mabo instead.

But Mabo just shook his head. "Nagase's not the sharpest crayon in the box, but he's not as dumb as he pretends to be either. When he's not on the crazy pills, he wouldn't be confused like that, so if he thinks there's something off about Leader, there probably is."

Tatsuya tried to keep on the subject, well aware that he'd probably regret asking (especially since he was still trying to avoid answering to Gussan himself), but he'd never been able to ignore Mabo properly yet. "Leader? Why Leader?"

Mabo shrugged. "Mr. Kitigawa told him he could have his own band. Said he should go by Leader, to inspire loyalty in the other members… of course then Mr. Kitigawa just keeps calling him You like everyone else, but Joshima still seems to like it. And even I'm not brave enough to call a guy that much older than me Shige."

Even though Tatsuya was only a year younger than Joshima, he knew he'd have a hard time calling the guy Shige, too (at least not without having known him _way_ longer than three days), but then he wasn't as devoted to nicknames as Mabo. 

Nagase had started talking to someone Tatsuya couldn't see (and couldn't smell, at least not without shifting), but he didn't seem worried, so Tatsuya just kept an eye on him while he struggled to get the conversation back on track. "So you think there really is something up with Joshima? That maybe all that 'not really crazy' thing isn't just him being crazy?"

Mabo laughed. "Oh, he's totally crazy, but there might be something up with him anyway. Taichi, too. I mean, I know this place is kind of easygoing about the hiring policy, and maybe he's older than he looks, but, really, he'd have to be, since he doesn't really look all that much older than me. Not to mention which he seems a little iffy on the whole sanity question, too. Plus I keep seeing them whispering together in the corner, and they seem to know each other way too well for an orderly and a patient, especially new ones. I guess they could have been in another loony bin together, but that… well, that's a little weird, too, so unless it's something just amazingly weird like Taichi following his main squeeze around from place to place, I'm guessing it might be… um, I don't know, but with our luck it'll actually be something _monumentally_ weird."

Tatsuya could only agree about the luck. For all that he thought meeting Mabo and Nagase was about the best thing that had happened to him (post-bite, at any rate), he really would have to be crazy if he didn't think it was bad luck for all of them that they'd been here to meet in the first place. And figuring it was better to be prepared just in case it _was_ something _monumentally_ weird, he decided he'd have to investigate a little, no matter how much he liked the two. But first…

"Okay, why didn't Taichi get saddled with a weird nickname?"

Mabo just laughed again (the laugh that made Tatsuya suspect that perhaps the psychometry (and his father) weren't the _only_ reasons Mabo was in this place). "C'mon, the guy's an orderly, but goes by his first name even with the patients. Heck, even Dr. Takashima calls him Taichi, and I'd bet he doesn't call his own wife by her first name. Who needs a nickname with a name like that?"

~*~

Tatsuya might have felt a little more stealthy and subtle about figuring out what was up with the new guys if he hadn't had Mr. I Have To Talk To Everyone We Come Across along with him. Even more so if he hadn't had Nagase trailing along behind them, mumbling and periodically waving his hands at nothing they could see, but they didn't dare leave him behind just in case the ghost that was bugging Nagase turned out to be more than just a nuisance. 

As it was, the whole 'tailing Joshima and Taichi and deducing what they were up to from their recon info' plan lasted for about ten minutes, which is when Nagase finally noticed who they were tailing. Since subtle wasn't his strong point even when he wasn't stoned, he then asked (and not in his inside voice), "Are you sure Joshima isn't a ghost? 'Cause he looks like one to me."

They might have gotten lucky (in some improbable way) and the two tail-ees might not have heard him, but Mabo (intrinsically incapable of letting anything go) killed that possibility when he insisted (and not in his inside voice, either), "He can't be a ghost since I can see him. Though there's definitely something up, even beyond his obvious lie about not being crazy."

Since Joshima and Taichi weren't magically deaf at the moment and were now looking right at them, Tatsuya figured trying to stealthily and subtly run away was right out. And since shifting there in the hallway for anyone to see wasn't a good option, and since the ground hadn't conveniently swallowed him whole, there was nothing for it after that but to confront the two directly (and to hope he wasn't blushing too badly).

Tatsuya at least had the comfort that Joshima looked as embarrassed as Tatsuya felt, since the others appeared to be blissfully oblivious to how awkward the whole thing was.

~*~

"Apparently I… go invisible from time to time."

Tatsuya had thought he was immune to anymore paranormal surprises at that point in his life, but he had to say that Joshima had him on that one. 

Mabo, too, since his eyes were wide (and still a wee bit skeptical) when he asked, "Apparently?"

Even Nagase, sitting on Mabo's bed with his invisible friend, was shaking his head a little at that one, and Joshima's blush (which had finally receded when Mabo had let him have the good chair) bloomed again. He fidgeted in the chair, looking at Taichi for help (which, from Taichi's 'name, rank, and serial number' expression, wasn't coming any time soon), before he finally sighed and answered, "Well, _I_ can see myself, so it's not like I can say for sure, but no one else seems to see me, so it's a good bet. I'm… not all that good at controlling it, though."

Taichi gave up his stoic act for a moment to snort at that, but, after some prodding from Joshima, he finally said, "He can't just flip a switch and go see-through, and he reappears when he gets nervous or upset sometimes, but he really can go invisible if he walks around for a bit. It's more like you stop paying attention to him after a while and then, even if you look for him, you can't see him anymore. It'd be a useful trick if he were better at it." Taichi shrugged, and then grinned and added, "Or if he could pick a lock worth a damn, but as it is, all he's good for is eavesdropping on people who aren't particularly security conscious."

Tatsuya wondered if Taichi meant them, since they hadn't been particularly cautious, figuring if any of the staff heard them talking about something weird, they'd just chalk it up to being crazy. They'd never thought what it would mean if someone who would _believe_ them were around. Actually, Tatsuya still didn't know what to think of it. He decided that the less they said the better, since they didn't know exactly what Joshima had overheard. Until they knew why Joshima and Taichi were here, and exactly what they knew about the three of them, they'd be all the cautious that they hadn't been before.

But Mabo spoke up before Tatsuya could signal him the plan. And while he didn't come right out and say, "Okay, it's a fair cop, we've also got the Weirds," he might as well have. "And Joshima just happened to wind up here, and just happened to get all friendly with us, and then just happened to overhear us talking about things that made him think we wouldn't find him crazy, but would have reason to believe him instead? That's a little coincidental. And it certainly doesn't explain how someone who looks almost younger than I am can be an orderly."

"See, I told you no one would buy that you were twenty!" Joshima had completely lost his blush at that, smiling now that it was Taichi that was on the receiving end of the disbelief.

Taichi just waved it all off. He narrowed his eyes to slits and lowered his voice, apparently trying to look dangerous as he said, "If we told you why we came here, and just what ability _I_ have, we'd have to kill you," but even without Joshima's giggle (or the fact that even with slitted eyes and a lowered voice, Taichi still mainly just looked cute and young), no one was buying it.

Figuring they were just being jerked around, Tatsuya rolled his eyes. "I'd buy Joshima's  
'I'm not crazy' story before I'd believed that. Even Nagase's invisible friend is laughing at you."

Nagase started to say something (likely something along the lines that his invisible friend wasn't actually laughing (or even his friend)), but Mabo just hugged Nagase to him, conveniently putting his hand over the kid's mouth as he did it. Nice as he was, Mabo wasn't looking all that amused himself. "Why don't you just tell us why you're here at the Institute… besides the fact that you're both crazy, anyway."

Joshima started to object to that, but Taichi cut him off, for once looking completely serious. "We… well, we belong to a research group. And I know you're going to say we're too young for that, too, and we kind of are, but it's less that we're the researchers and more that we're… well, the researchees. Somewhat, anyway. Because Joshima can turn invisible, and I'm Muscle Man-"

He was cut off as Joshima said, "Taichi!" in an admonishing tone. He sighed, but continued with, "Okay, it's more like I'm the Energizer Bunny, in that I don't get tired easily and I'm super strong." 

Instead of calling Taichi on it again, Joshima just shook his head and amended the statement himself. "By which he means that while he's not super-powered, he's much stronger than you'd expect for someone his size. And the reason that matters is because that's why we're here in a way. One of the, um, researchers in our group has a nephew that used to work here, and when the nephew found out about what his uncle was researching, he mentioned that there were people here that might have unusual abilities, too. So we were admitted, undercover, kind of as a favor to a friend type of thing. We had Matsuoka's and Nagase's names already, so we thought we'd just be friendly for a while and see if there really was something unusual about them. We hadn't expected… well, you," he nodded at Tatsuya," and we hadn't figured on being so obvious, either, since we were just thinking they were kids and wouldn't notice."

Joshima blushed again and added, "For someone who goes invisible, I've never been very good about being subtle, I guess. But that's all it was. We were just trying to find out if you guys could be… part of our group."

Part of their group. Tatsuya couldn't figure out whether that might be a good thing or not. It would definitely take more information and some time to think about it. Nagase mumbling something muffled behind Mabo's hand reminded Tatsuya that it would probably be good to shelve the whole thing until one of them wasn't stoned, as well. 

He managed to keep Mabo from outright verifying that they actually would be eligible for the group by copying him, slapping his hand over Mabo's mouth before he could get anything else potentially incriminating out. He almost laughed, thinking the three of them looked like a chain of monkeys sitting on the bed, Nagase gagged by Mabo, Mabo by him, but then he wondered who would keep him from saying something he might not ought to and didn't feel much like laughing anymore. 

It was too much to figure out with Joshima and Taichi right in front of them, though, so he just said, "We'll talk later." After they left (Taichi none too willing to go without arguing some more), the three of them just sat there for a while, a chain of confused monkeys (or more like two confused ones and one of them too out of it to know he should be confused), and wondered what could go weird next.

~*~

"The thing that freaks me out the most is knowing that people have been paying me attention, even enough to talk about me outside the Institute, when I'd kind of thought I was hidden here."

It was the first time Nagase had even hinted at how he'd wound up in the Institute in the first place, at least to him, but Tatsuya didn't have the heart to press it further, more than a little freaked out himself. He was sure his parents would be in perfect agreement with him on that (for once), since they'd pretty much put him here to keep anyone from noticing him. That the three of them didn't just exist in the little world they'd made for themselves, that there were people who'd noticed them and hadn't just assumed they were crazy… well, that was a bigger bite of reality than Tatsuya wanted to chew.

"Plus, even knowing that Joshima isn't a ghost, the fact that he still _feels_ like one is freaking me out, too. Oh, and that Taichi might really be Muscle Man. I really wish the rec room would get that manga. I asked Dr. Takashima, but he always just says when my grades improve he'll consider it."

Nagase sighed (probably over the improbability of his grades improving), and Tatsuya was left to wonder if it really had been necessary to wait until the kid was sober again before they'd talked about things, considering his conversations sometimes weren't all that different regardless. But then Nagase, with his _here and now_ outlook on things, was looking less freaked out than Tatsuya felt, for all that he was listing things he was freaked out about. Air head that he was (young as he was), Tatsuya still thought the kid was kind of cool for handling all the shit life had thrown at him as well as he did.

Even Mabo, the closet worrier, who looked happy and carefree on the surface, but who paid such close attention to everyone around him, wasn't as weirded out by what Joshima and Taichi had said as Tatsuya was. Before he'd left to go to see if this was a good Saturday or a bad one (and Tatsuya was never quite sure which _Mabo_ found worse, when his father showed up or when he didn't (though Tatsuya was quite sure which way he and Nagase were voting)), Mabo had just shrugged at the problem. "Sure it's weird that they showed up the way they did. For one thing, how did they get someone to agree to let them go 'undercover', anyway? Even with the orderly nephew, I wouldn't have thought the doctors would agree to it… but then most of the doctors here aren't exactly the biggest humanitarians in the world, and if this research group offered a little donation, I'm guessing that might smooth the way for academic consideration. Anyway, it's also a little weird that the research group let what basically adds up to two kids going undercover, too, but maybe they thought they'd have a better chance of sounding things out, since they're like us. Regardless, they seem fairly nice, and I don't think it can do any harm to at least hear what the research is all about and such. Maybe we can get some newer games, or even day trips and stuff out of it if it all works out."

Nagase had perked up at the mention of new games, and Tatsuya could admit that a couple of days out of the Institute sounded good, but for all that, he… well, he was still freaked.

He and Nagase were still working on the Things That Freaked Them Out list when Mrs. Kurosawa knocked on his door, her hands fluttering and obviously upset. "The young master… his father… I couldn't see, mind you, but my granddaughter said she thought he might be crying and his father was awfully loud. Louder than normal, even."

The young master was Mrs. Kurosawa's name for Mabo, and that she was aware enough of things going on around her, without the filter of her normal delusions, meant the situation with Mabo must be bad. Considering how many truly disturbing things she'd normally see living in an insane asylum (and that she just blithely ignored), Tatsuya didn't even take the time to reassure her, just took off running, Nagase right behind him. 

That Mrs. Kurosawa or her granddaughter hadn't found an orderly or a nurse nearby that could have handled the situation was bad (and damn the hospital and its budget cuts that left weekends perpetually understaffed), since Mabo's father was big enough (and often mean enough) to pretty much take all three of them together. Tatsuya really didn't think that shifting to the Cocker Spaniel, regardless of the heightened senses he got out of it, was going to do anything for him but get him kicked, either. 

Tatsuya had the odd thought that this could be a lesson to Taichi's research group, that just because you had strange abilities didn't mean that life didn't have a way of jerking you around all the same. Not that it really mattered in the end, he reminded himself, because even if they weren't actually superheroes (even if they were mostly just scared kids doing the best they could), they were still going to protect their own.

It turned out they didn't have to. Or maybe it turned out that 'their own' was a larger group than Tatsuya could admit to yet, because there was already an orderly in the visiting room by the time they got there. Mabo's father looked like Goliath next to Taichi's David (or at least like the Super-Sized version to Taichi's Kid's Meal frame), and Tatsuya was afraid he was going to be broken like a toothpick before they'd be able to help, but by the time he and Nagase had gotten through the door, Taichi already had the jerk's arm wrenched behind his back, and was using his other hand to hold onto the guy's belt (pretty much giving him a wedgie) as he marched the man past them, out of the room, down the hall, and then right out the security door to the lobby. 

There he gave him a hard shove, sending Mabo's father stumbling towards the front door. Taichi waved (his skinny little arm that Joshima really hadn't been kidding about it being stronger than you'd think) at the bastard as he said, "Please come back and visit again when you've evolved past the monkey flinging shit stage!" 

For a moment Mabo's father seemed to consider trying his luck again, but Taichi just stared him down (his glare far more effective than it had been when he'd used it against them, and far more effective than it should be considering he still looked too cute and too young to pull it off, but then maybe that was another superpower). 

It was only after the asshole had finally left, not even looking behind him as he tried to slam the door (which was pointless, since it was pneumatic), that Tatsuya realized that Mabo hadn't followed them. He wanted to talk to Taichi, to tell him thanks, and maybe other things (relieved that the brat had been telling the truth about his strength, relieved that he'd used it for Mabo, relieved that maybe it wasn't just the three of them anymore), but all he could spare time for at the moment was clapping him on the back and saying, "I'll find you guys later," before he and Nagase took off running again.

They finally tracked Mabo back to his room. He was sitting on the bed, knees drawn up, head hanging down, looking for all the world like a puppy that had been kicked. Considering the incipient bruises Tatsuya could see on Mabo's arms, visible even half-hidden by the too-large t-shirt he was wearing that day, he thought the kid had plenty of reason to look that way.

But Mabo could ignore the past (even the past that had just happened) just as well as Nagase when he put his mind to it, and he wasn't going to talk about his father, at least not then. Instead he sat up straight, putting on his best smile (the one that was sweet instead of manic), and Tatsuya thought that it might even be real. The kid had had far too many years to learn how to let go of his father, and even if he'd never quite managed to kick the habit of loving him completely, he at least knew how to deal with the aftereffects when he had it turn around and bite him. 

Tatsuya, who hadn't seen his own father in nearly six months (and who only sometimes didn't miss him, even as angry as it usually made him), smiled back and let him pretend nothing was wrong.

~*~

It had seemed a little ungrateful after that to not at least listen to what Taichi and Joshima had to say, so there they all were back in Mabo's room again, the only difference this time being that Taichi had been given the good seat and Nagase's invisible friend was gone. Nagase was still a little tired from that bit of work (some exorcisms seemed to drain him more than others), so Tatsuya let the kid lean against him as he sat on the bed (and tried not to sneeze at the lingering scent of ozone) , and listened to what they had to say.

Mabo asked most of the questions, that sharp brain of his focusing in on something besides his own problems, but Tatsuya could tell that for all he was almost grilling the other two, he was still a little excited about the idea of spending a couple of days a week being part of some controlled experiments, or at least what he hoped they could gain by it. He did seem intent on making sure there'd be nothing they'd be uncomfortable with, nothing they couldn't refuse if it came to it, but the answers he got seemed to satisfy him, and Tatsuya could even see the considering look Mabo got when Taichi described how nice their facilities were, and guessed he was thinking about whether it might not turn from something part-time to them leaving the Institute altogether. Tatsuya had to admit none of it _sounded_ bad to him.

But part of him was still a little wary; he just didn't know why. On an instinctive level he liked Taichi and Joshima, even with the lies they'd told. There was nothing about them that made him bristle (like so many of the doctors did), and his nose didn't smell anything to make him think they were lying now. Maybe they weren't telling everything, and they were definitely nervous, but then they were in essence giving a sales pitch, and Tatsuya was pretty sure that would make most people nervous. He was also pretty sure that you didn't mention _everything_ in a sales pitch, especially not some of the down sides, but he was willing to accept the idealized version on a trial basis at least. Or at least he would be if he could figure out what was making him hesitate.

Eventually he just let Mabo's and Nagase's reaction decide him since he couldn't seem to nail down his own. Mabo was completely behind it, wanting the advantages and not seeing any harm in demonstrating what he could do, as long as he got to put his foot down about how he demonstrated it (and the way he kept emphasizing that made Tatsuya think there might be a story there, but he'd have to save his questions for some time when Mabo wasn't feeling so defensive about the past). 

Nagase was harder to read, still thrown off by Joshima's ghostiness (Nagase's word, not the dictionary's) and not sure if it was a good idea to talk about what he did too much (and Tatsuya was positive there was a story in that, but it wasn't good odds that he'd ever getting to hear it, at least not without asking Nagase while he was drugged, which always felt a little mean), but he liked the idea of getting new games a lot, and he was used to Mabo being better at figuring things out, so he was okay with going along. 

So in the end, Tatsuya just nodded his agreement and demonstrated what he could do when it was his turn for show and tell.

The next morning he'd wonder why Joshima had seemed a little sad when they'd all agreed to join the project. He'd wonder why it was Taichi who'd done most of the talking, Joshima's lips drawn tight over something he wasn't saying. He'd wonder why even Taichi had looked a little down when he'd said goodnight for the evening. But at the time he'd just thought they were feeling what he was: relief and maybe a little wonder. That there were other freaks like them out in the world (which he could have guessed, since it was too improbable to believe that the only three Weirds in the world had wound up together, but that he'd never really thought too hard about). That it wasn't just him there to look after Mabo and Nagase (and, yes, they'd been looking after themselves before he came along, but he couldn't help but feel protective even so), especially if something happened somewhere along the way. Tatsuya had even felt happy that their lives looked like they were improving and that luck was finally going his way.

But the next morning Tatsuya woke up to find Taichi and Joshima gone without even saying goodbye. It would have been a little surprising, and maybe a little confusing, but Tatsuya would have just put it down to their going back to their group to set things up. 

If only Nagase hadn't been gone as well.

~*~

4.

They wasted a lot of time on disbelief at first. Searching all around the yard, asking the nurses and the orderlies they could find, even getting them to open the laundry room just in case someone had stuffed Nagase's body there or something (Tatsuya hadn't been prone to pessimism when he was younger, but three years after the worst dog bite ever, and worst case scenarios were second nature to him). But no one knew where he'd gone (though the staff was just treating it like the kid had run away, ignoring Mabo (which had to be a first) when he swore that wasn't it), and he wasn't there. He just wasn't anywhere.

They wasted even more time after that calling themselves stupid (among other, less polite, things). _They should never have trusted Taichi and Joshima in the first place, it was all too suspicious now that they thought about it, too coincidental, too much good luck to have happened to them, etc etc_ spilling out until even Mabo's new-found tendency towards self-flagellation had had enough.

After giving themselves one last mental slap for wasting time Nagase might not have, they focused down to what needed to be done. Tatsuya shifted, putting his nose to work while Mabo schmoozed (and sometimes outright conned/snuck/stole) his way into looking at the paperwork the Institute had on Joshima and Taichi. Tatsuya found a trail that went out the back door, and Mabo found a smoking gun.

"They weren't here as a favor to an orderly, for sure, nor even to any academic group. The name of the organization was redacted on the hard copies of the files, and the computer files were outright deleted, but they used a bunch of initials throughout, and it had government agency written all over it. Well, not written, but… you know what I mean."

The kid was flustered, tongue almost tripping over itself trying to get the info out, and Tatsuya could understand the urgency. It was one thing if Nagase were taken by some rogue academic group looking to make their name proving some phenomena or other. Neither one of them wanted to consider what use an at least semi-secret government agency would be putting the kid to, especially when they already had at least two people with odd abilities already on board. Nor how they were going to get him the hell back. 

Tatsuya felt like growling (or maybe crying, depending on whether the dog or the boy was holding the reins). He'd followed the scent out the rear service door, but the staff had been on alert because of Nagase's disappearance and there was no way, even shifted, that he was slipping past the locked and (now) guarded gate out back. The front door was an even greater impossibility, and Tatsuya could almost feel the trail growing colder while they floundered around trying to find the way.

Mabo snapped his fingers. "Do we have anything that we know Taichi or Joshima touched a lot? Or even touched recently? Because maybe we don't have to rely on you finding Nagase's trail in order to find him… maybe I can find him instead."

He could have wasted even more time calling himself stupid (because why have a friend who's a psychometrer if you're not going to use him), but Tatsuya wasn't going down that road again. He had a twelve-year-old kid who talked to ghosts to find, he had a fourteen-year-old kid that was going to touch things to find him, and he had a Cocker Spaniel's nose that would know just what things Mabo needed to touch to do it. 

Tatsuya might have been wrong yesterday about Taichi being one of them, but he definitely hadn't been wrong about them protecting their own. They were going to find Nagase, and nothing and no one was going to stand in their way.

~*~

It was anti-climatic in the end. The first thing Mabo touched (a toothbrush Joshima left) gave him a pastiche of images: Taichi sitting behind a desk (complaining) in a (sort of normal) looking office, a slightly older (than any of them, anyway) man in black fatigues rubbing his face and looking tired as he said, "Orders are orders, and this one will be followed even if it's not you that does it", Joshima seeing his reflection in the glass on a door as he walked in, the address on the plate beside the door. An old warehouse, from what Mabo could guess, hiding something far less mundane behind its rundown façade.

Their escape was a little less anti-climatic. They used a borrowed uniform (too big for Mabo, which might raise suspicions, but was necessary for their plan), lunch time (when half the staff and a lot of the patients were busy in the cafeteria), and a stray dog that the guard on the back gate had to let out, confused about how it got in in the first place and not paying enough attention to the orderly in the ill-fitting uniform that slipped out behind him. It was more luck than planning, really, and Tatsuya had been sure the guard would notice _something_ , but they managed to slip away without setting off any alarms. 

Mabo shucked the uniform when they were a couple of blocks away, his own clothes underneath it. Then Tatsuya shifted back and slipped into the uniform (a little tight on him), and hoped that the money he'd had on him when his parents had committed him was enough to get them to where they needed to go.

~*~

The subway had cost too much, but they'd managed to find a bus that went near their destination. It was a long trip, a crosstown route that stopped often, weekend shoppers and the lunch time crowd making for a lot of stops, and it gave Tatsuya too much time to think. About everything that could go wrong, and about how maybe he shouldn't be taking Mabo with him, and about how Joshima had left that toothbrush even knowing what Mabo could do, and confused about the sadness he could still remember on both their faces, and… well, just confused in general. He wished there was something they could be planning, some trick they had up their sleeve that would give him something to concentrate on, but all he had was worry and too little information to go on.

They had decided that Tatsuya would scout out the warehouse first, Mabo holding onto the uniform while he looked around, but when it came to it, they didn't need to scout out anything, Joshima and Taichi waiting at the bus stop when they got off.

Joshima looked frantic and Taichi looked irritated (and maybe a little frantic underneath that), and Tatsuya was already expecting the worst before Joshima even managed to get out, "We lost him!"

Okay, that wasn't quite as bad as Tatsuya had feared, but it still made him want to punch the hell out of the two idiots in front of him, but Mabo put his hand on Tatsuya's shoulder, holding him still. "Let's hear what's going on before you start biting anything."

Joshima, apparently just then realizing how close he was to losing blood, vehemently nodded at that, though he lost some of his bounce when Mabo added, "You can always do it afterward."

Taichi started to posture a little, but then he deflated, just saying, "Yeah, we'll deal with that later. Let's just go… okay, not back to the office, because that's just going to lead to other people getting involved, and we don't have time for that, so let's just go to the ramen shop on the corner. The guy we left watching the hospital said you two didn't eat lunch and I somehow doubt you ate breakfast either, and who knows when we'll get a chance to eat later."

Tatsuya had a moment of disconnect at how normal the whole thing was. Nagase was missing, and that was still gnawing at him, but Taichi's pragmatic solution to filling them in on what was happening and yet still making sure they were okay for later made him feel more in control, oddly enough. Like maybe there really was a way out of this whole mess, even with the colossal fuckup it looked to be. 

It also made Tatsuya even more sure that the toothbrush had been left behind on purpose, that maybe Joshima had even deliberately thought about the address when he was holding it, because even beyond the spy they'd left at the Institute, it was so obvious that Joshima and Taichi had been expecting them. For the first time since he'd woken up and found Nagase gone, Tatsuya wondered if he'd really been all that wrong about the other two after all.

Joshima got them a table, ordered their food, and got them drinks, all with a minimum of fuss, like he had a lot of practice taking care of people, and Taichi just let him do it, as if it were nothing unusual. Tatsuya wondered if maybe Joshima felt about Taichi the same way he did about Mabo and Nagase, like he was Joshima's to take care of even if he was only a few years younger. He'd have to ask more about how they'd met later, saying he didn't have to beat the shit out of the two of them before then.

Unlike the night before, this time both Joshima and Taichi did the talking, cutting each other off now and then to fill in details, but mainly getting what they needed to say out quickly. It followed fairly closely to the story they'd told before, just substituting a secret government crime fighting group for a research group, and the fact that they'd been hunting for a 'weapon' they could use against a terrorist group that was far too elusive for anyone's good. Their boss, who they just referred to as Higashi, really did have a nephew that worked at the Institute, and he'd mentioned Mabo's talent before. They'd considered bringing him in to see if he could help, but even (theoretically) hard as nails secret agents tended to balk at using kids to catch criminals, not even liking how young Taichi was, let alone Mabo. 

But Higashi wasn't the big boss, and he'd been instructed to use whoever and whatever he could get, the terrorists they were after far too dangerous and far too elusive. Which had meant that Joshima and Taichi had been called in, in the hopes that they could sound out Mabo to see exactly what it was he could do. They'd had Nagase's name, too, but the orderly had left before Tatsuya had come in, which had thrown them off for a while. But, "Well, you know what happened from there," Taichi finished.

Tatsuya shook his head, his anger, which had been squarely directed at the two in front of him now spread out to pretty much cover the world. "I get that you guys were desperate. Big bad guys, big bad plans, destruction on a grand scale, and so on and so on, but Nagase's just a kid. A kid who sees ghosts, yeah, but just a kid. How the fuck did you think he was going to be able to help you out? Hell, how did you think Mabo was going to be able to help you out?"

Joshima hadn't looked happy, but he looked even more miserable at that. "We… well, actually we'd hoped none of you would have anything helpful to contribute. At first, anyway. I mean even if it hadn't been now, your names were already on a list, so you'd have gotten a visit one day, regardless, but Higashi was trying to hold out until you were all older at least. Trying to find someone who was older in the first place, too, but apparently, um, people like us are hard to find, and by the time they get to be adults they've either gotten really good at hiding what they can do or not doing it at all, so we're… well, as much as the higher-ups think that a 'paranormal' division, one that would operate underground and do things a 'normal' group wouldn't be able to do, is a good idea, and have sunk a fair amount of time and effort-"

"And money," Taichi added.

"And money into getting, they really only have Taichi and me right now, and neither one of our abilities is all that useful for this case, at least not yet. I can spy on people, and I have managed to find some info that was helpful, but for the most part I'm mainly a good eavesdropper. I can't just randomly find secret lairs, and even if I could, I can't walk through walls-"

"Or even pick locks," Taichi said (again, and it was apparently a sore point, as he'd brought it up at the Institute, too).

"Or pick locks," Joshima admitted, obviously too used to the complaint to care that much about it. "But Nagase, he can talk to, er, _people_ that can walk through walls. And some of the agents even thought he might be able to get ghosts to scout out places for him and then report back anything they found. Higashi thought it was worth checking out, anyway, and that there'd be minimal danger."

Mabo, who'd been conspicuously chewing his ramen rather than yelling at anyone, had enough at that. "Obviously it wasn't minimal enough if you lost him!"

Taichi had the decency to wince at that. "Yeah, it didn't exactly go to plan. Higashi's boss wanted the kid brought in, end of story, and he wanted him as tractable as possible, so, well, that meant leaving you two, and any objections you might have, behind, especially since they felt Nagase would be easier to, um, manage if they used the same meds the Institute had him on. We did try to explain that it apparently gave him less control, but, hey, we're just peons, so the kid got doped up big."

Joshima rolled his eyes at Taichi's phrasing, but he didn't correct it, which told Tatsuya that it was pretty much the truth. He had to take a cue from Mabo and stuff a big bite of ramen in his mouth to keep from detailing exactly all the ways that sucked. "If he was drugged, he wouldn't have just wandered off. The drugs tend to make him tired. So how did you wind up losing him and why haven't you been able to find him since?"

They both looked to the other to answer, but eventually Joshima gave in and explained. "We didn't have any location on these guys, nothing we could trace back to any one person or any one place. But what we did have were dead bodies. Unfortunately we had lots of those. They've been keeping a lid on things so the public didn't panic, but the higher-ups aren't wrong about these terrorists really needing to be stopped. The plan that was finally agreed on was that we'd bring Nagase to the sites where the deaths had occurred and he'd see if there were any ghosts left. Then maybe we'd get some descriptions of the people who'd been involved, or at least maybe be able to get some kind of info on where they'd gone to afterwards. Something, anyway.

It worked, too. Nagase found any number of ghosts, and they were willing to talk about what had happened. Apparently they wanted to talk too much, from the way he reacted. But he got us descriptions of some of the terrorists-"

"Though it was like pulling teeth to get a composite drawing from a drugged kid describing what a ghost had told him." Taichi rolled his eyes at the memory, but Joshima just ignored him this time and went on. "We even got a general vicinity that the base of operations is likely in, since some of the ghosts had tried to follow, though they lost them after a while. What we hadn't realized at the time was that one of the dead bodies was… well, was one of the terrorists. We only found out when we ran the composites and got some hits and then saw their known associates. But…"

Joshima trailed off, apparently looking for just the right way to phrase something, but Taichi just rolled his eyes again and took over. "We're only guessing, because we obviously we're paying enough attention to the kid, and no one actually saw what happened, but either the dead terrorist was a real true believer type, or maybe just a plain mean bastard, or, hell, I don't know, but since Nagase just seemed to have disappeared, and we couldn't find any sign that he'd either wandered off or left with an actual living person, we can only assume that it was the ghost that took him and we can only guess that he didn't have any good intentions in doing it." 

Taichi shook his head, looking (for once) older than he actually was and even more irritated than usual. "And how fucked up is your life when you have to admit that you're afraid the kid that you were supposed to be looking after got stolen by a dead terrorist and the only thing you can do while waiting for someone to narrow down where the terrorists' base is, is hope that's where the dead asshole actually took the kid… saying he actually _took_ him anywhere at all?"

There wasn't enough ramen in the world to keep Tatsuya from saying (or maybe more like yelling) exactly what he thought about that, but at least he had the satisfaction of telling Taichi just how wrong he was about something (besides taking Nagase in the first place). Because they weren't going to sit there and just wait and hope that the kid was okay. "You have a psychometrer sitting at this table and a guy with a nose like the best bloodhound you could hope to find. Fuck waiting. Let's go find some bad guys."

~*~

Even understanding that it really hadn't been Joshima and Taichi's decision to take Nagase, nor even their boss' to some degree, Tatsuya wasn't over being angry at them. He could guess that their reasons for doing the whole secret freak crimebusters things probably weren't all good (or even maybe completely voluntary), and that they'd been trying to make the best of the bad choices they had, but the whole lot of them had been far too cavalier about putting a kid in danger (and Tatsuya thought he should probably put Taichi in the kid category while he was at it), and the impulse he had to just start punching hadn't totally gone away even with having better things to do.

Oddly, though, for all that none of them were quite happy with the others, they worked well together. Joshima coordinated their search with the other agents, passing information back and forth between all the groups, so smooth at liaising between everyone that Tatsuya thought the Leader nickname might not be that far off after all. And while Tatsuya was shifted, focused on following what faint traces of Nagase's scent he could find (and just happy that there actually were any, and that he didn't have to imagine the worst case scenario quite yet), Taichi kept a careful watch on Mabo, keeping him near just in case his talent came in handy, but doing a better job of looking out for him than he'd obviously done with Nagase.

The search came to an end at another warehouse (and Tatsuya could have almost laughed that both sides of the law liked the use the same type of hideout), the location verified both by Tatsuya's nose and Mabo's hands. Mabo looked a little shaken by whatever he'd seen when he'd touched one of the door handles, but he just shook his head when Taichi asked him if he was okay. Whatever he'd seen, Tatsuya was relieved that at least it wasn't about Nagase. 

They finally got to meet Higashi then (who gave Taichi a hard glare when Tatsuya called him that). He at least had the decency to look embarrassed about how things had turned out even while he was thanking them for their help. Tatsuya could tell he wanted to sideline them now that they were at the end game, to at least try to keep them out of harm's way, but he was obviously smart enough to know that they weren’t likely to trust Nagase's safety to those who'd lost him in the first place. 

Apparently he was smart enough to use the resources he had at hand, too, having Joshima go see-through long enough to scout the exterior of the building for any obvious traps or alarms. He did keep the Freak Squad (as Taichi had taken to calling them) back behind the first wave of agents entering the warehouse, and he assigned a couple of the more experienced agents (the ones that didn't even blink when Tatsuya switched from dog to naked human and then back again) to give them extra cover, but he also gave them the go-ahead to lead the search for Nagase.

Mabo balked when Tatsuya told him to stay behind, but he eventually settled down to wait with the field techs, mollified when Joshima said that the fewer of them sneaking around meant the fewer of them that might get seen and attract attention (and not saying anything about being too young like Tatsuya likely would have). By the time they were just entering the building, Mabo already had the techs pretty much eating out of his hand. Tatsuya looked back, feeling a frission of fear at leaving him alone, but he knew the techs were probably better at fighting than he was if it came to it, and that at least this time someone was actually paying attention to the kid in their care.

The warehouse was dark and crowded with dusty shelves and towers of rusting oil drums. It was also a warren of enclosures and screened-off rooms, and since all the good body-heat reading tech had gone along with the main force, it was just as well they had someone with them who had a good sense of smell, because they'd have been nearly blind otherwise. As it was, Tatsuya had to fight with the warring impulses of taking his time to make sure they didn't walk into anything nasty versus finding Nagase as fast as he could, and the periodic bouts of shouting and gunfire that kept erupting in other parts of the building weren't helping either impulse.

Five minutes of search time wound up feeling like hours, and Tatsuya would have to remember to tell Nagase that searching a terrorist hideout was another thing he was adding to the list of Things That Freaked Them Out, but luckily, regardless of Taichi's insisting he'd like a chance to kick a little ass, they managed to find Nagase without coming across any actual terrorists. Any live ones, at any rate. 

As it was, Tatsuya had barely had a chance to get through the door of the room Nagase was in before it slammed shut again, leaving everyone but one beat up kid and one (not all that large) dog alone to face whatever it was that had beat up the kid in the first place. Tatsuya could hear Joshima and Taichi (and probably the two agents) hitting at the door, but even though it rattled and bowed at the force Taichi was applying, Tatsuya still only had Nagase on his side when the ghost first struck out at him.

The blow seemed to come out of nowhere, Tatsuya's were-senses getting a general idea of where the ghost was, but not enough to pinpoint him. It sent him bowling across the room, his paws having little traction on the cheap linoleum under them, but it turned out to be an advantage, since he wound up next to the kid. Nagase was awake, but he wasn't tracking all that well, his head tilting a little to the side as he tried to focus in on the dog right in front of him. He was aware, though, because he sighed out, "You came," like the cavalry had arrived. Tatsuya, already feeling like cavalry might be overstating things a little, felt even less like a rescue when another blow sent him smacking into the wall.

Nagase tried to stand up to help, but overbalanced before he even got halfway up, adding yet another couple of bruises to the ones already showing. He sat there, hunched over, shaking a little as he started to cry, something Tatsuya had never seen him do, even on the worst of days. His voice was more tired than scared, though, when he said, "Just fucking leave us alone already! You're dead. You're not going to get any less dead no matter what you do. Bringing me here certainly didn't do anything for you, it just scared the jerks you said were your friends. Even the few of them that believed me when I told them what you said didn't want to know about it, because dead is dead to them. So just… just stop."

Tatsuya hadn't ever been able to hear the ghosts like Nagase could, but he could tell the dead bastard had a lot to say to that, Nagase just sitting there resigned until something made him flinch, the precursor to the blow that knocked him flat again. Nagase's lip, already split and swollen, started bleeding, the blood smearing over his chin and fingers as Nagase tried to wipe it away.

The red of it barely showed in the dim room, dark against the too pale face, but Tatsuya could smell it, down to his bones even. Could smell the fear on the kid, and the pain and exhaustion. He could smell the drugs that were still holding Nagase's ability in check, that wouldn't let him exorcise the fucking bastard like he should have been able to (or at least _might_ have been able to, though considering the dead guy had managed to transport Nagase all the way here, he might have been one of the ones that were strong enough to make that difficult). Tatsuya could smell that one of the two people he truly loved was hurting and he was terrified he wouldn't be able to stop him from being hurt worse. It was the straw that finally broke denial's back.

He'd already had a weird couple of days, and this one had just topped them all. He'd been holding it in most of a day after the nurses just dismissed Nagase as a runaway. He'd been holding it in for hours after Joshima and Taichi had explained just how they'd fucked up. He'd been holding it in for minutes after a bunch of secret agent types had prioritized catching bad guys over saving a kid that they'd put in danger in the first place, though they'd at least let him take up their slack. He'd been holding it in for _years_ , what he'd truly become and what he might become from there. But enough was enough, and he (whatever he truly was) wasn't fucking holding it in anymore.

It was all a blur after that, the only clear thing the smell of Nagase's blood and the feeling of shifting into something that wasn't the _him_ he'd ever been before. It all ran together until he couldn't tell any part of it from the next, and he never was sure what he actually _did_. Nagase just said he got _really, really scary_ , but then Nagase had had a concussion and was hardly the most articulate guy in the first place. All Taichi would say (from what he'd seen after he'd finally managed to break the door into tiny little pieces) was that he hadn't looked so much like a Cocker Spaniel any more so much as Cujo; still tiny and furry, but feral and dangerous for all that. 

All Tatsuya really knew was that he'd scared himself; like he'd shifted into something that he never wanted to be again, and the loss of awareness, the loss of _control_ was just another thing on the freak out list. But whatever had actually happened, he at least had the satisfaction of knowing he'd apparently freaked the hell out of a ghost, since Nagase never saw it again, and in the end… Tatsuya knew he'd do it again (wouldn't hesitate to do it again) if that's what it took to keep the others safe.

~*~

A lot of Tatsuya's pleasure in getting Nagase back was muted when Higashi had him patched up by their medic rather than taking the kid to the hospital. It wasn't quite the same thing as Higashi telling them that they were basically prisoners, but it wasn't that far away from it, either.

By the time they were taken back to the other secret headquarters (the warehouse that the theoretical good guys used, which, Tatsuya had to admit, was much cleaner and less scary looking than the other one had been), even Nagase (still not tracking all that well) had figured out that they were screwed. He just sighed and sat next to Mabo on the couch in Joshima and Taichi's office, falling asleep against the other boy because he was just too tired (and crashing a little now that the drugs were wearing off) to care anymore.

It made Tatsuya angry all over again, but he was still trying to process what had happened the last time he got really angry, so he bit it back and reminded himself that even though they hadn't handled things all that well, he was still pretty sure that Joshima and Taichi (and maybe Higashi to some degree) weren't the ones actually screwing them over.

While Joshima was fussing over getting drinks and food for everyone (Coke and cup ramen, the staff of life), Tatsuya looked around their office, hoping it would tell him more about how things really were than either Joshima or Taichi had so far. It was a pretty typical office; two desks, two chairs, two computers (the one with a screensaver of Kazu obviously Taichi's, so the one of Boøwy must be Joshima's (which told Tatsuya that at least the guy had decent taste about _something_ ). The carpet was worn but fairly clean, and the dust on the cabinets was light, so Tatsuya knew that neither of them were total slobs (or that at least they were forced to clean ever once in a while). There were some personal touches here and there, the most notable being an _X-Files_ \- _I Want To Believe_ poster taped to the wall. At one point someone had whited it out to read _I Want To Be Free_ , but then it had been edited to _I Want To Eat Free_. Tatsuya suspected he knew who had done that last one, at least.

He had been going over how he was going to respond to the 'offer' that was sure to come as he looked around. But even after seeing what the place said about them, even after seeing that Joshima and Taichi, while maybe not there entirely of their own free will, weren't entirely unhappy with things, either, Tatsuya was still a little torn. Though, really, if they refused outright, how long would it be until someone (and maybe it would be a new set of someones than the ones they'd already seen, which would likely suck even more than it already did) decided that Nagase or Mabo (or, heck, even him) was a useful commodity and decided to conscript them, maybe even by force. Better to be here where they knew the score and could stay together, wasn't it? He might be able to protect the others at least a little that way.

While he'd been debating how to handle a sales pitch in his head, though, Taichi had apparently been preparing a whole other type of offer. After Joshima had passed out the food and drinks (Mabo waking Nagase so he could get something in him, even if he just threw it back up again later), Taichi stood up, staring at all of them like they'd insulted his mother (or worse, his Winning 11 team) and slammed his hand against his desk. "Here's how it's going to be! You do what I say, when I say it, and you'll be damn snappy about it, too. After all, you've all already been locked up for being crazy. If you don't play your cards right, who knows what might happen."

Tatsuya actually had a moment where he was just a little afraid of Taichi, but even that faded when Joshima clucked at him, "Taichi!" He looked back at them and said, "He's just joking. If you don't want to work with us, it's okay. I'm sure Higashi will take care of… things." He paused, apparently lost for how to phrase that in a less vague but still non-scary way, but then he decided to just brush past it and continued, "Well, I don't mean he'd get you out of the hospital, since you were all committed for a reason, after all, but nothing bad… well, nothing worse than what's already happened will, um, happen." He trailed off, glaring at Taichi as if daring him to start it up again.

Taichi just shrugged. "Hey, I don't get paid much. I have to take my fun where I can."

As sales pitches went, it was a little indirect (so far no one had actually _asked_ them to work there) and more than a little odd (but then Tatsuya had already come to expect that from these two, even with knowing them less than a week), but in a weird way it was easier to take than a real attempt to convince them would have been.

He knew Mabo (alarmingly quiet) and Nagase (asleep again) were pretty much leaving the decision to him, both of them more disturbed by what had happened than they were willing to show and basically just treading water, trying to hold on until things either went back to the way it had been or at least until something made sense again. Saying it ever did. But even with the weight of all their lives resting on him, it wasn't hard to make his choice.

In the end it came down to simple pros and cons. Con, they were none of them exactly old enough for this kind of thing, and Tatsuya was the only one of them whose talent had any kind of martial ability whatsoever tied into it. Con, he didn't want to work for a group that would take advantage of kids just trying to live the most normal life they could. Con, they'd probably have to share the office with Taichi and Joshima and it would be damned crowded, Taichi, Mabo, and Nagase likely to take up more room (and be far noisier) than any three skinny kids ought to.

But it was the pros that carried the day all the same. Pro, it wasn't like Tatsuya fully believed that Higashi would (or maybe _could_ was the better word) take care of _things_ for them, and it was better to make the best deal for themselves going in than it was to wait to be drafted. 

Pro, Mabo might be better off at the Institute, surrounded by the crazy people he could almost understand, the mostly sane king ruling in the land of madness, but even that wasn't a guarantee. Mabo tended to just gloss over the subject when Tatsuya tried to mention it, but his power was getting stronger little by little, and the gloves he used to dampen his ability (that he'd rarely used when Tatsuya first met him) were getting worn more often as time went by. And it wasn't like there was a manual they could look at to tell them just where that was going to end and what Mabo was likely to be when it did… if it did.

And perhaps an even more worrying pro was Nagase. The kid wasn't crazy, no, but he could easily become so. Day in and day out, even on the good days, the kid had little privacy at the Institute, hospitals being basically a breeding ground for ghosts, and even the nicer ones tended not to care if they were disturbing him. But even worse, how many years of spending half the week at the mercy of things that were pretty scary even when he wasn't doped to the gills could the kid take before it took its toll? Sure, Nagase had been placed in the middle of a dangerous situation and had it bite him in the ass, but it wasn't like he couldn't have run into a ghost just as dangerous at the Institute. There might very well come a day (likely Monday, Wednesday, or Friday, but it wasn't like Tatsuya could be sure to stop it (not without maybe losing himself in the process) on one of the better days, either) when another ghost showed up that didn't just stop with punching the kid around.

And though he wished he didn't have to include himself in the list, the last pro was Tatsuya. He could lie and say it was only the kids he was thinking about, but he'd tried to stop doing that since he came to the Institute. It was a big step forward to just admit what he was; no denial, no shame (though, okay, still a little embarrassment). But as big as that step had been, as great as the Institute had oddly turned out to be, it was still just a resting place. There were still too many things he didn't know about himself and what he could do, and he couldn't hide from it forever.

~*~

Tatsuya would have thought Higashi would be the one to make the deal with when he finally said yes, but Joshima turned out to be the 'contract' guy, going over the ins and outs of what would be expected from them (lots of things) and what they could expect from the agency (not as much as he'd have hoped), with an eye to detail that was almost scary. Tatsuya made a note to himself to stop thinking of Joshima as mostly harmless, when it was obvious something much sharper was resting under the surface of the mother hen. 

Though since Joshima made sure to take them to their assigned apartment himself (saying he thought they'd be more comfortable sharing a room for the meantime), and since Joshima made the kids hot chocolate before they went to bed, and since he even made sure to tuck them all into their futons, Tatsuya figured the sharp thing must be pretty far down.

It had been a long day and all of them were tired (plus one of them was concussed and all, the Things To Watch Out For In The Case Of Concussion list the medic had given them firmly committed to Mabo and Tatsuya's memories), but even though they were being quiet, Tatsuya could tell the other two weren't asleep, all three of them lying there and trying to make sense of the whirlwind they'd been thrown into. When he finally couldn't take going over it (and over it and over it) in his mind anymore, Tatsuya threw back the covers to his futon, shifting before he settled back down to wait. He didn't have to wait long, Mabo shoving Nagase between them before he pretty much draped himself right over both of them, Tatsuya's fur caught in both their hands as they all finally drifted off.

/story

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. The movie that Mabo and Nagase got to watch after Nagase's threat is a joke for those that might not know, since it's one of Mabo's movies. ;)  
> 2\. The joke about the pyramids being in India (not to mention the being bad at kanji) is something Nagase really got confused on, though he was way older than 12 when he did it. *snork*  
> 3\. Yes, I had way too much fun imagining Gussan being bitten by a dog and instead of turning into a scary, vicious werewolf or something, he turned into, in essence, Junon, but then I'm just sick that way!


End file.
